Monday, April 22, 2013

Her Name!!!!

This is a short post! Sofie for the first time EVER said her name tonight :) OMG copious smiles in the house tonight. She has never been able to answer when someone has asked her what her name was. It has been one of the things that always made me sad. She knows what her name is, she answers to it all the time. She just didn't know how to say it. Well, tonight it came out about 50 times. It is not perfect. S and F are almost impossible for her to say at this point. It sounds more like OATEE and the T is really soft and barely audible. Still, I don't care, she said it and that is all that matters :)

Friday, April 19, 2013

Trying to stay strong and patient!

It has been a kind of a difficult week. It is hard to complain about it though when I see what other adoptive parents are going through with their sick kiddos and all the other events that have happened across this country. It does help put things in perspective, still, this is what we deal with on a daily basis. I have been trying to keep my posts fairly upbeat as our life is pretty darn fantastic. It can still be tiresome and require a lot of patience. I remember though, when I first started blogging, that one of the reasons I was going to blog was to educate and help anyone who read it. I wanted to be honest.

Sofie has made remarkable strides with her speech therapy. She has learned how to move her lips and tongue to make sounds and she does an amazing job with all her vowels. The consonants she has a much harder time with. If you plug her nose and get her to say a word, some consonants, like B and P she can say. Unplug her nose and they come out like vowels. Because of her cleft, she has air escaping into her nasal cavity and she cannot trap enough air in her mouth to force the consonant sound out. We are pretty sure that it is going to require another surgery to correct. Her tonsils are also very large and we may end up having to get those removed before they can do the speech surgery. We will meet with the ENT soon to see how and when to proceed. It is much different this time going into a surgery knowing full well what you are in for. It is not a minor procedure and it will be another painful surgery with only a liquid diet at the end. I try not to dwell on it, but I can't help it. It makes me very sad knowing what she could be in for.

Her speech therapy also involves a lot of thinking outside the box. She can't be treated as simply a cleft kiddo with a speech impairment or as a hard of hearing kiddo with a speech impairment. Factor in that she was adopted at the age of 2 1/2 and never learned her mother tongue, and you have to do a lot of adapting in Sofie's treatment and therapy. One of her speech pathologists is great at that, the other one is still on a learning curve. That frustrates me sometimes :)

Sofie is also starting to get very frustrated at times. It is hard to know what to attribute each behavior too. She is 3, hard of hearing and has a difficult time making people understand her when she talks. Bad combination!!! Most of the time I can understand what she is getting at. The odd time when I have no idea what she is talking about, she gets very angry. Lots of temper tantrums, but she is also 3....lots of temper tantrums. The more words she learns, the harder it is to understand her. People think it would be easier to understand because her language base is expanding. Not so. Keep in mind that she knows what the word means, she just can't say it well enough to have someone else understand it. It is like you have had a stroke and you know what you are trying to say and NO ONE gets it!!! Very frustrating....and you are 3 :) I have more patience than I ever knew I had....and less some days too! It is so stressful to be driving down the highway and have your child say something to you over and over again and you have no idea what they are trying to say or what point they are trying to get across. She gets madder and madder and I am trying to drive a car. It ended up with the both of us bawling our eyes out in the driveway :) We then went in the house and had some chocolate and all was right with the world again :)

It is such a difficult thing to explain to someone, so hard to put into words. She is such an amazing little girl who just attacks life head on and smiles through it all.  I think that is what makes the times that she gets angry and frustrated so difficult. It is really not like her and it breaks my heart when I don't understand her. I guess I feel a little guilty. I am supposed to figure this stuff out. She has to learn how to hear, how to listen, how to move her lips and tongue to make sounds, what sounds to make when and what they all mean......wow! She has come a long way, but, she has such a long way to go yet. I am worried that the surgery won't help with her speech. I know that there is nothing I can do about it so there is no point in worrying about it. That is what I tell myself anyway. Sofie has been through so much already. She just needs to catch a break. She really needs this surgery, if it happens, to be extremely successful.

I try to focus on all that is wonderful in our lives, which is a lot. Ainsley is so good with her sister. They play school together, dress up in funny clothes and just love each other immensely. They dance sing and play together, all that sisters are supposed to do. Sofie is still just a riot and constantly has us laughing. She is so goofy and just loves people. I love my kids dearly and I wouldn't change a thing about our lives at all, ever. Sometimes I just need to let it out :)

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Huatulco, Mexico 2013

Ainsley and Sofie pictures

Almost 11 months

We are coming up on Sofie's 11 month anniversary of her forever family day. I cannot believe it has been almost a year already. Where does the time go???
Life is still just a continual whirlwind of activity and comings and goings. I really need a secretary. I am really good at remembering where and when each kid has to go somewhere or do something, not so good at organizing the bill paying and appointments. I have been trying for 3 weeks now to make dental appointments for all of us. Yes, it sounds easy to do, yet, it seems to never get done. I don't make them because I have so many other more pressing appointments to make so I wait until I get those done so I don't have to call back and reschedule and then more appointments pop up and the dentist keeps getting pushed back. It sounds so easy in writing :)

We went to Huatulco Mexico on the March break and had a fantastic time. We met several other very nice families all from Minnesota. The resort was wonderful and the area was the "real" Mexico and not all touristy. I will post some pictures on a link for you to look at.
We were very concerned with how Sofie would do on this trip. It was her first plane ride since coming home from China. We talked about it as much we could and tried to prepare her. She shut down when we got to the airport and started rocking back and forth from her front leg to her back leg. This is what she does when she is very stressed out and can't cope with it. Once we reached the terminal she slowly started calming down. By the time we got on the plane she was all excited and demanded to be in charge of her carry on bag.....too cute. When the pilot turned off the seatbelt sign, Sofie turned around and looked down the plane. At that point she realized that she had a totally captive audience and she let out a big HI and then continued to entertain the whole plane with songs and dance. That's my girl. She made more friends on this trip than I think the rest of us did combined. We relaxed by the pool and walked on the beach and had a very enjoyable family vacation. We even went to a sea turtle sanctuary and got to release baby sea turtles, who were only a few hours old, into the ocean. What an amazing experience. We also got to take a tour by boat of a lagoon that is next to the ocean that is full of crocodiles and all sorts of wildlife. We stopped at an island to have beer, pop and home made quesadillas that were cooked on an open fire. It was sooooooooo good!

Because we basically were in the water or a pool or sand for about a week, Sofie rarely was able to wear her hearing aids. It was an interesting week. She regressed quite a bit over the week, both with her potty training and with her language. There was a lot more baby talk and she stopped even trying to say the words properly or try to communicate with sign language. Since we have been back home and she has been wearing her aids, there is a big difference. As her deaf/hard of hearing teacher stated, it is a good thing to know that her aids are actually making a difference.

We have another meeting with Early Childhood Ed on April 22 to determine which kind of and where Sofie will take classes next year. It should be an interesting meeting. It has taken them since January to determine that their FM system is not compatible with her hearing aids. She was hearing her class in one ear and a class next door in the other ear. It was very frustrating for her and we have finally determined that they will use her personal FM system at school until they can order her one in July. Gotta love dealing with the Dept of Education :)

I will try to post some pictures from out trip on a link today or tomorrow :)